CoinBack.IO

The biggest problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem is that not enough people have bitcoins.

We need an easy and a simple way and preferably from a friendly trusted face for people to get bitcoins without wiring money to a remote nation, entering online credit card details and waiting a few days. Our experience has shown us that people are willing to pay a big premium to buy bitcoin in person, especially the first time. Merchants are always hungry for new profitable revenue streams as well. Coinback.io is a win for all parties and has evolved from nine months of working with retail merchants on Bitcoin adoption.

With coinback.io you can easily go to your favourite merchant and buy a small amount of bitcoins instantly. Merchants can acquire bitcoins by selling his products/services for bitcoin. Merchants bitcoins are not tied to the current bitcoin exchange rate, but have the average of the price he has acquired them at. So when a merchant sells his bitcoins he sees what is his average price and what is the current exchange price. Moreover he can decide premium on bitcoins he is selling. A merchant can send Bitcoin to a customer who has no wallet and thanks to the blockchain.info api we create him a new wallet on the fly.

The merchant has made profit, a customer has just acquired bitcoin from a trusted local source, the ecosystem has grown and a new bitcoiner.

Installation

Quick notes about bitcoin wallet/APIs used

• For merchant wallet creation is used blockchain.info Create Wallets API and sending out payments blockchain.info Wallet API to multiple addresses with sendmany API method
• For notification about receiving payments is used Chain.com Notifications API

Thus you have to make sure that you are registered at both of these API providers and have your API keys ready (more about it below).
Blockchain.info requires manual approval from their side

Tech stack and required libraries/dependencies

• PHP version 5.4+
• Laravel 4 framework (comes with coinback.io project)
• Composer to pull all dependencies for Laravel framework
• Apache/Nginx server - must do URL rewriting by Laravel convention - http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/installation
• PostgreSQL (or any relational database)
• SendGrid or other SMTP provider to send emails
• Plivo API for sending out SMS
• Optional IP4R module for Postgres for faster IP to location lookup - query time decreases from 5 seconds to 100 milliseconds

Before continuing, get yourself familiar with Laravel 4

Moreover simple dependency injection was used in some places and some necessary unit testing has been done.

Installations

1. Clone this project
2. By Laravel convention you have to create .env.*php files in your local/staging/production environments. More details about it here
3. Create in root folder of project in your local machine .env.local.php and .env.testing.php (for unit testing) files and .env.php in your production server.
   We will fill their contents in a moment
4. In bootstrap/start.php around line 27 inside $app->detectEnvironment fill your machines correct host name for local and production, also for staging if you plan to have it
   Quick ghetto way to know your host name is with following PHP code echo gethostname();
5. Set your bitcoin address to where is going 1% fee in app/config/app.php fee_address key
6. Copy the below content in all your .env.*php files and replace values to yours

<?php
return array(
'APP_DEBUG'         => true, // always FALSE for production. It shows the debugbar in browser and full stacktrace on screen if errors happen

'ENCRYPTION_KEY' => 'xxxxxx5@xxxx%kxxhO^-xxxE1', // random 32 characters encryption key used to encrypt passwords and other sensitive data

'DATABASE_DRIVER'   => 'pgsql', // for postgres its 'pgsql' - check in Laravel documentation
'DATABASE_NAME'     => 'coinback',
'DATABASE_USER'     => 'user',
'DATABASE_PASSWORD' => 'pass',

/* keeping locations and blocks table in separate database. you can have it same as first database, just fill same values as your first database */
'DATABASE_2'        => 'pgsql2',
'DATABASE_2_NAME'   => 'easybitz',
'DATABASE_2_USER'   => 'user',
'DATABASE_2_PASSWORD'=> 'pass',

/* Only used to validate bitcoin address correctness. values either mainnet or testnet.
 * Here can be only mainnet because blockchain.info doesnt have testnet */
'BITCOIN_VERSION' => 'mainnet',

/*  your blockchain.info API key */
'BCINFO_KEY'        => 'xxxxxx-aaaaa-ffff-oooo-xxxxxxx',

/* your chain.com API credentials */
'CHAIN_COM_ID'      => 'xxxxxxxxxxx',
'CHAIN_COM_SECRET'  => 'xxxxxxxxxxx',
'CHAIN_COM_API_URL' => 'https://api.chain.com/v2',
/** callback URL to where chain.com shoots of incoming transaction. Here it's in @ControlController#postReceive*/
'CHAIN_COM_NOTIFICATION_URL' => 'http://example.com/process/receive',

/* here using SendGrid as SMTP service to send emails. You can replace SendGrid with any other SMTP provider
* Values from here are set in app/config/mail.php */
'MAIL_ADMIN'        => '[email protected]', // admin email to where error logs are sent
'MAIL_FROM'         => '[email protected]',
'MAIL_FROM_NAME'    => 'Coinback',
'MAIL_HOST'         => 'smtp.sendgrid.net',
'MAIL_PORT'         => 587,
'MAIL_USER'         => 'your_sendgrid_user_here', // sendgrid user
'MAIL_PASS'         => 'your_sendgrid_password', // sendgrid password

/* Where to send error messages. start with country code (no + sign in front), phones are comma separated */
'ADMIN_PHONES' => '',

/* Plivo credentials */
'PLIVO_ID'          => 'xxxxxxxx',
'PLIVO_TOKEN'       => 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx',
'PLIVO_NUMBER'      => 'xxxxxx', // your registered plivo number
);

Next steps are important that are actually seeding db and importing dependencies

Now after you have filled your environment files, it's time to fetch all Laravel dependencies

6. In project root folder run composer update or sudo composer update which will fetch all Laravel dependencies
7. Now again in root folder run php artisan migrate which creates required tables for the project. This is schema builder script which files are located in app/database/migrations
8. Import downloaded locations and block tables from MaxMind either to separate database or same database. In .env.*.php you specified DATABASE_2 value in which database is located locations data
9. Make sure to rename primary key column in locations table from location_id to id because by Laravel Eloquent convention the primary key for every table is just id.
   Blocks table must stay as it is, no need to rename column because we are not using Eloquent ORM for that
10. Now is time for IP4R module in PostgreSQL
    Run this SQL query to create a function

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION inet_to_bigint(inet)
  RETURNS bigint AS
$BODY$
    SELECT $1 - inet '0.0.0.0'
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE sql VOLATILE
  COST 100;
ALTER FUNCTION inet_to_bigint(inet)
  OWNER TO postgres;

If you don't have it or you are using something else than Postgres then in app/models/Location.php in method public static function getUserLocationByIp($ip) remove the else part in code and App::environment checking.
So it should be

public static function getUserLocationByIp($ip)
{
    if (!starts_with($ip, '::ffff:')) {
        $ip = '::ffff:'.$ip;
    }

    // no ip4r module
    return Location::with('country')
                   ->whereRaw('locations.id = ( select geoname_id from blocks where net_ip >>= ? )',
                       array($ip))->first();
}

With above method without ip4r a query for user location could take up to 5 seconds!

If you have IP4R module for postgres leave Location.php as it is.

Now the preparation is done and website should be up and running and everything working!

Localization

Whole project can be localized and Laravel has extremely easy way to localize project!
The translations are located in app/lang/en folder and instead of en folder is your 2 letter lowercase language code.
To output the text in code, use trans('web.text') where web is the file name where translations are and text is the key for the string.
Find out more about localization in Laravel documentation

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